Abomination: The Nemesis Project

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It may be your last chance to shoot up a zombie cult before the year 2000, but is it any fun?

By IGN Staff

I remember playing X-Com until my head hurt. Damn it was a great game. So good, nobody -- not even Microprose, the folks who made the original ¿ have been able to recreate the quality and intensity of it. X-Com: UFO Defense defined an entire genre, and holds the rare distinction of being a game that spawned several clones that never lived up to the original. So, years after X-Com's release, and dozens of bad titles later, companies started giving up on the quest to recreate the amazing tactical turn-based strategy Microprose's masterpiece had to offer. I'm not sure who it was that first came up with the idea of converting the isometric view tactical turn-based play into real-time, but it was never a good idea. It probably spawned out of the intense real-time infatuation we had a few years ago, and some exec thought that they'd just join Command & Conquer and X-Com in holy matrimony. Ugh. So now, in '99, the beastly offspring of this unlikely marriage is Abombination: The Nemesis Project. And if the title alone didn't warn you enough (or make you laugh out loud), I'm here to tell you that it ain't pretty.

So, looking at the Abomination box, right below the title, it says "Action Strategy Mayhem". What a slogan! My response -- "Exactly". You could, by a stretch of the imagination, call it an action game. It is, technically, a strategy title. Most fittingly, though, it's mayhem. Abomination is chaotic, baffling, bizarre, hard to control -- in one word, "Mayhem!" Hothouse, attempting with this title to recreate the luster of X-Com in a fashionable real-time action-heavy post-viral outbreak scenario, seemed in all intents and purposes to have a decent idea on their hands. Where did everything go so wrong? Well, it all starts with the plot.

The plot. Ahh, the plot. I snort, chortle, and eventually break out into full on laughter when I think of it. It's not that the setting and plot are that bad, they're just incredibly over the top cliché. Apparently, there's been a nasty plague in the United States, and nearly everyone is killed. The plague's victim's blood boils and pours out of every orifice (orifi?), and become hideously mutated and disfigured. Only a handful of the population survives and are unaffected, for some unknown reason, and these people split into two groups. Some join a mysterious cult called "The Faithful," and roam around the cities stirring up trouble and causing a general ruckus. Others band together as a resistance to the cult, and attempt to survive together in the new hostile environment. Six days after the plague has befallen the poor American citizens, in a hidden Bio-facility, eight specially trained commandos (possibly part of some protection scheme planned before the outbreak) walk out of the airtight building ready to kick ass and take names. The absurd cliché's don't stop there! It isn't only the title that's hilarious, some of the characters actually have nicknames like "Viper", "Ninja", and "Doc." It must have taken months of development "focus sessions" to come up with those brilliant names, eh? Even stranger, many of the zombie/mutant/cultists have transformed into cyborgs, and the towns are littered with alien-like technology pillars and random machinery intertwined with (human?) flesh. I'm still not sure what's up with that.

So you, the gamer, are placed in command of this unique fighting force emerging from the protective bio-facility. In addition to controlling these men and women, you manage the stores and allocation of equipment, weapons, and ammunition. Speaking of which, Abomination has a very sizeable number of weapons, and this is hands down the coolest feature in the game. There's something about sorting through all those glorious weapons and hand picking firearms for each operative that gets my juices flowing. Sadly, though, the weapons in-game are fairly indistinguishable. In the main map screen, which depicts an arial view of a large city, you control various command centers, storerooms, and communication arrays. It is in this screen that you also respond to terrorist acts caused by The Faithful, and send your squads off to destroy them. You can control the flow of time, to essentially fast-forward to the next conflict, or slow down time when you need to begin sending a team to combat a movement of The Faithful.

Also from this main map screen, you can check the various data files on the HQ computer. Here, there is a sizeable amount of background information on the virus outbreak, on individual team members, weapon specs, etc. This data area of Abomination is actually fairly well done. Each of the main 8 operatives has a special skill. For example, "Ninja" can go invisible for a short time, and "Steel" has hardened skin. This is a good idea that fails in actual execution. The skills are totally pointless, as it's much more effective to simply shoot the cultists with a machinegun than to fiddle around with the cumbersome layout pop-ups to find the special skill toggle. There are many more operatives than the original eight, but they're all just characterless/skilless human shields. Imagine for a moment how you or I would fair in a firefight with assault rifle wielding zombie cyborg cultists and you get the picture. The missions themselves are disappointingly simple. They're basically limited to: "Go to this section of town and kill everyone," "Go to this enemy base and kill everyone," "Find and escort this idiot back to the truck for extraction," or occasionally, "Place this random weird item where we tell you to." I know this genre of game is fairly limited on mission types, but guys, at least try to spice things up a little!

Now, we come to control. You'd think that, by now, that all game developers, being the game fiends that they are, would have figured out that real-time games, by their very nature, demand great control. Apparently not. The gang at Hothouse has transformed, by sheer poor control alone, a game that could have been mediocre into a game that is, well, poor. If a tactical strategy game is going to substitute the long, thought out moves of a turn-based play style with a real-time environment, the control must be solid, seamless, and intuitive. Otherwise, the game quickly turns into a nightmare to play. Example A: Abomination. It's one title that would have been infinitely better if it had opted for a turn-based system. With the control as hard as it is, it's just not acceptable. It's an effort to even get the warriors moving, and after countless attempts, I more or less gave up on trying to successfully and accurately control more than one commando at a time. In battle, it just turns into a circus. On the control side of things, not a good showing at all.

In Abomination: The Nemesis Project, the Artificial Intelligence is more like Artificial Stupidity. At least, thankfully, it isn't that the AI doesn't work at all, which has been an awful trend these days in our favorite ship-now-patch-later industry. It's just that the AI is lobotomized. It might be borderline excusable that the enemies walk and act like zombies (because, well, they are zombies), but the player controlled characters act exactly the same way. Often they'll stumble in a pack down the street and shoot only at the nearest enemy, not taking into account at all what kind of weapons are being used ¿ such as the slight (*cough*) difference between a sniper rifle and a heavy machinegun. All weapons, in that way, have nearly the same effect. Lame! So, with that in mind, it's probably not hard for you to imagine that attempting to control these characters in combat can be completely maddening. Half the time, they save the evil cultists the effort and kill themselves. It's often easier to just run through the levels with one decked out character. Also lame.

Graphically, Abomination doesn't look bad -- only dated. On the whole, the 2D and even the 3D visuals look straight out of '97. The 2D backgrounds are decent and clean, but they just don't cut it these days. On the plus side, the game runs silky smooth on even a mid-range machine -- but no bonus points awarded there. With graphics as mediocre as these, they should run well. The 3D rendered characters and enemies (which are then placed on a 2D background) are the only noticeable use of the thumpin' video card you have in your system. The character models do come off looking a bit funky, but they get the job done, and the weapon effects and explosions are all acceptable.

The real brain-bender is the interface. I'm simply baffled why Hothouse chose to go with the interface they did for Abomination: The Nemesis Project. After hours and hours of playing, I still haven't gotten it completely figured out. It's like they chose the interface for how it looks over its functionality, which is weak in itself, without counting the fact that the interface doesn't even look very good. Figure that one out. The layout is so poor it actually detracts from the game. As far as bugs go, I didn't run into a single one. From what I experienced, Abomination was a very stable product. Not a bad accomplishment. Perhaps the wackiest part of this whole operation: the manual. It's informative, sure. Maybe even well written. But it's printed in something like 8-point font. It makes reading the manual a ridiculously taxing chore, considering that making it with a more standard sized font would have made everything so much better. Maybe they were on a tight budget, who can guess? Either way, it makes it that much harder to find the information you need.

All of the music is industrial, but since it's all questionable quality, it comes off as a sorry attempt to make the game appear "Extreme!" It's just another feature in Abomination that lives up to the ongoing theme of cliché. The sound effects are run of the mill, and like the music, get the job done. But, certainly without any razzle-dazzle. The limited amount of ambient noises during gameplay turns into a real pain, as you keep hearing the same poor woman emitting this awful drugged-up sounding groan.

There is multiplayer support, which is a huge plus for Abomination. And it is, believe it or not, actually fun. The only problem you'll encounter here is trying to find a handful of people to play with. While the multiplayer is certainly good, I wouldn't call it a saving grace for the title. It just adds some replayability, and is a good excursion if you tire of the aggravating AI you find in the one player campaign.

So, it's not a huge surprise that Hothouse hasn't managed to pull off a coup here by recreating anew in real-time the success of X-Com. They weren't the first to fail, and they certainly won't be the last. However, I would like to point out that with Abomination: The Nemesis Project, Hothouse has assembled many of the necessary features needed to pull off a great strategy title. There are plenty of weapons, and the base/city management combined with a lengthy campaign and multiplayer support is certainly a step in the right direction. But when I step away from it a moment, I can't help but think that Abomination, described in one word, is...uh...bizarre.